We had another prenatal visit with the midwife today. This marks week 16 of the pregnancy... I heard the heart beat again, nice and strong this time. I scheduled an ultrasound for three weeks from now, and I decided to do the quad-screen.
The decision of whether a person wants to do the triple screen/quad screen seems ridiculously controversial. For those not in the know (and we weren't really, until about 16 weeks ago) this is an optional test that you can do sometime between weeks 16 and 20. This test compares blood levels of certain hormones with a woman's age to determine her relative risk of carrying a child that has specific birth defects. One of the reasons it's optional is because the test is fairly imprecise and one runs a fairly high risk of coming up with a false positive. With medical testing, the question is always "what are you going to do with this information." A lot of women feel that the couldn't really do anything to change their pregnancy and will deliver whatever they can, birth defects or not. So for those women, the triple screen is relatively useless and they usually don't get it.
Sweets is a planner. Sweets has decided that whatever tools exist that can help a person prepare for the future should be utilized. He and I went back and forth over this issue, trying to decide. We are excited to be having a baby, but there is this part of me that questions whether I currently have the ability to care for a child that we already know is significantly impaired. So in the end we decided that I would go and ask the midwife her feelings about it. Being a good midwife, she helped me sort out my ideas and I came to the conclusion that this test is a good idea and I should go ahead and do it. One of her points of view is that there is information about the placenta that she can learn from the quad-screen, and so she feels better having whatever information she has in preparation. When I heard that we actually do get the quad-screen and not the triple screen (this makes it slightly more precise and therefore a little less apt to produce inaccurate results) I was swayed. So now I have a nice sore bruise on my arm and I get to sit back and worry about the results for a few weeks.
One of my close friends at school here is having a baby about six weeks after we have ours. She is a midwife and has been specializing in home births at school. I expect she'll have a home birth, which is great for her. She and her husband are a little more militant about these tests- they don't seem to be interested in doing these. I can totally respect that- if anyone can make an informed decision about pregnancy it's a midwife, after all. I just worry when she's going to ask what we did what she will say in response. Sometimes it's hard to get medical friends to stop being medical and just start being friends. I don't care what the studies say or what statistics you choose to obey. I had long conversations with my husband about the possible chain of events a bad test result would mean and we decided to proceed anyway. So support my decision, darn it!
In fact, these friends are coming over for dinner tonight and I don't have anything prepared. ouch. I'm supposed to make enchiladas. I also have a huge paper due on thursday and I don't have that prepared AT ALL! AAAAAA!